Paul Pennyfeather was reading for the Church. It was his second year of uneventful residence at Scone. He had come there after a creditable career at a small public-school of ecclesiastical temper on the South Downs, where he had edited the magazine, been President of the Debating Society, and had, as his report said, “exercised a wholesome influence for good” in the House of which he was head boy. At home he lived in Onslow Square with his guardian, a prosperous solicitor who was proud of his progress and abysmally bored by his company. Both his parents had died in India at the time when he won the essay prize at his preparatory school. For two years he had lived within his allowance, aided by two valuable scholarships. He smoked three ounces of tobacco a week—John Cotton, Medium—and drank a pint and a half of beer a day, the half at luncheon and the pint at dinner, a meal he invariably ate in Hall. He had four friends, three of whom had been at school with him. None of the Bollinger Club had ever heard of Paul Pennyfeather, and he, oddly enough, had not heard of them.
Little suspecting the incalculable consequences that the evening was to have for him, he bicycled happily back from a meeting of the League of Nations Union. There had been a most interesting paper about plebiscites in Poland. He thought of smoking a pipe and reading another chapter of the Forsyte Saga before going to bed. He knocked at the gate, was admitted, put away his bicycle, and diffidently, as always, made his way across the quad towards his rooms. What a lot of people there seemed to be about! Paul had no particular objection to drunkenness—he had read rather a daring paper to the Thomas More Society on the subject—but he was consumedly shy of drunkards.
Out of the night Lumsden of Strathdrummond swayed across his path like a druidical rocking-stone. Paul tried to pass.
Now it so happened that the tie of Paul’s old school bore a marked resemblance to the pale blue and white of the Bollinger Club. The difference of a quarter of an inch in the width of the stripes was not one that Lumsden of Strathdrummond was likely to appreciate.
“Here’s an awful man wearing the Boller tie,” said the Laird. It is not for nothing that since pre-Christian times his family has exercised chieftainship over unchartered miles of barren moorland.
Mr. Sniggs was looking rather apprehensively at Mr. Postlethwaite.
“They appear to have caught somebody,” he said. “I hope they don’t do him any serious harm.”
“Dear me, can it be Lord Rending? I think I ought to intervene.”
“No, Sniggs,” said Mr. Postlethwaite, laying a hand on his impetuous colleague’s arm. “No, no, no. It would be unwise. We have the prestige of the senior common-room to consider. In their present state they might not prove amenable to discipline. We must at all costs avoid an outrage.”
At length the crowd parted, and Mr. Sniggs gave a sigh of relief.
“But it’s quite all right. It isn’t Rending. It’s Pennyfeather—someone of no importance.”
“Well, that saves a great deal of trouble. I am glad, Sniggs; I am, really. What a lot of clothes the young man appears to have lost!”
Next morning there was a lovely College meeting.
“Two hundred and thirty pounds,” murmured the Domestic Bursar ecstatically, “not counting the damage! That means five evenings, with what we have already collected. Five evenings of Founder’s port!”
“The case of Pennyfeather,” the Master was saying, “seems to be quite a different matter altogether. He ran the whole length of the quadrangle, you say, without his trousers. It is unseemly. It is more; it is indecent. In fact, I am almost prepared to say that it is flagrantly indecent. It is not the conduct we expect of a scholar.”
“Perhaps if we fined him really heavily?” suggested the Junior Dean.
“I very much doubt whether he could pay. I understand he is not well off. Without trousers, indeed! And at that time of night! I think we should do far better to get rid of him altogether. That sort of young man does the College no good.”
Two hours later, while Paul was packing his three suits in his little leather trunk, the Domestic Bursar sent a message that he wished to see him.
“Ah, Mr. Pennyfeather,” he said, “I have examined your rooms and notice two slight burns, one on the windowsill and the other on the chimneypiece, no doubt from cigarette ends. I am charging you five and sixpence for each of them on your battels. That is all, thank you.”
As he crossed the quad Paul met Mr. Sniggs.
“Just off?” said the Junior Dean brightly.
“Yes, sir,” said Paul.
And a little further on he met the Chaplain.
“Oh, Pennyfeather, before you go, surely you have my copy of Dean Stanley’s Eastern Church?”
“Yes. I left it on your table.”
“Thank you. Well, goodbye, my dear boy. I suppose that after that reprehensible affair last night you will have to think of some other profession. Well, you may congratulate yourself that you discovered your unfitness for the priesthood before it was too late. If a parson does a thing of that sort, you know, all the world knows. And so many do, alas! What do you propose doing?”
“I don’t really know yet.”
“There is always commerce, of course. Perhaps you may be able to bring to the great world of business some of the ideals you have learned at Scone. But it won’t be easy, you know. It is a thing to be lived down with courage. What did Dr. Johnson say about fortitude? … Dear, dear!
